Sabine Hossenfelder
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2025
9:42 · 3.1M views · Feb 15, 2025
Sabine Hossenfelder reads a confidential email and uses it to explain her worries about academia and incentives in theoretical physics research. She ties it to her earlier Nature Physics comment on research quality.
Cited in threads about science funding and trust in research as an angry insider critique of academic incentives, though some commenters doubt it.
5 comments from Hacker News
this video Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
Just yesterday I watched a video by a disgruntled former academic physicist about the state of modern physics research. [0] Not sure of its credence, I don't really understand physics. In the fields I do have a bit of understanding, there does seem to be an amazing amount of fluff and bloat, but also still a significant amount of good and useful knowledge creation. The bloat isn't really surprising: Largely inoculated from market forces, the way modern research is conducted has enormous amounts of inefficiencies, which in turn creates plenty of ways to game the system. Without university accreditation it is very hard to publish research, get grants or invites to conferences, so there is little reason for universities to take less of your grant. Why should journals not be super profitable? It is one of the very few "objective" metrics of success in academia, Nature could probably introduce expensive publishing fees tomorrow, and people would still fall in line. And universities don't really have to adapt, because going to one is basically required to get a good paying job. I don't know how to fix that, it seems like a very hard problem. Just shutting everything down and leaving it to the private market as the Trump administration is aiming to do seems overkill, but sometimes it might also be necessary to break a stagnating system before rebuilding it better. [0] this video
It surprises me that some obvious clues to treatment are passed over as I guess they don't fit the politics? Like >A team of researchers in Jerusalem, he says, decided to look at patients who survived bladder cancer and compare dementia prevalence among patients treated with BCG and those who weren’t. “Do they differ in the rate at which they get Alzheimer’s disease?” The answer is yes – the BCG group appeared to get 75% protection against Alzheimer’s. A number of studies have now found varying levels of protection from BCG, with an average, according to one meta‑analysis, of 45%. There's a lot of evidence a lot of it is set off by infectious microbes which can be treated in the usual way. (From [LINK] ) The 'politics' puzzles me. Maybe the head of department got fame for hypothesis A and feels his power or money is threatened by hypothesis B? It's not what science should be about. (There was an entertaining angry Sabine Hossenfelder youtube a few minutes ago on the corruption of science just wasting money, but really letting people die of Alzheimer's is worse. this video )
It's weird that you'd guess (wrong) that I'm an "LLM bull", then start generalizing the actions of this supposed group. Hallucinations are a problem, no news value there. Sabine seems not to be able to get value out of LLMs, and concludes that they aren't useful. The logic is not exactly impressive. It's a tool. It can be useful, it doesn't always work. Some people claim it's better than it is, some people claim it's worse. This isn't exactly rocket science. Regardless of the tweet in question, Sabine is a grifter. Her novel takes on academia being some kind of conspiracy of people milking the system, and of physicists not being interested in making new discoveries are nonsensical and only serves to increase her own profile. Look at this video of her trying to convince the world she received an email that apparently proves all her points correct. My BS detector tells me she wrote that email herself, but you be the judge: this video
Sabine Hossenfelder: We now live in the grip of post-factualism would seem naturally repellent to most physicists. But in championing theory without demanding empirical evidence, we're guilty of ignoring the facts ourselves. Original paper URL: [LINK] Accessible URL: [LINK] YouTube Video by the Author: this video